YouTube’s bully problems prove that community doesn’t scale

Drew Olanoff Contributor

Editor’s note: Drew is a geek who first worked at AOL when he was 16 years old and went on to become a senior writer at TechCrunch. He is now the VP of Communications for venture equity fund Scaleworks.

I have a confession to make. It’s something that I live with daily. It’s not that I’m not proud of it…it’s just that I’m never sure how people will see me after they know my “secret.”

Here goes nothing.

I.

Was.

A.

YouTuber.

Yes, there it is.

Whew, I feel so much better. Or do I? Actually, I don’t. Get ready for a whole lot of “In My Day…” and “It Wasn’t Supposed To Be Like This” because to quote Whoopie Goldberg in Ghost, “Molly, you in danger girl.”

In the beginning

Just to set this up, I’m from Philly. Basically as far away from “Silicon Valley” as you can be in mind and spirit. Before I was a YouTuber, I was a podcaster. A bunch of friends and coworkers of mine wondered out loud, “What if we just recorded ourselves talking about technology? Would anyone listen? Do we even care if anyone listens? No? OK, let’s do it.”

The Best Damn Tech Show, Period. was born.

We went to meetups, podcast tapings, we even got sponsors. Crazy. People kinda listened. We learned about RSS and editing and compression and all kinds of things. It was never a real “side hustle” but just for fun. We had a blast.

Then on February 14, 2005 in the faraway land of San Mateo, CA, a site was born. It was called “YouTube” and it was amazing. Democratization of video. You didn’t have to be famous or important to put anything on it. You could goof off, show a video of your cat doing something stupid and maybe 40 people would watch and you went along on your merry way. It wasn’t an obsession, it was a distraction. Kind of like TV is, but for anyone and everyone.

That was the point.

Google saw potential to the tune of $1.65 billion when they acquired it lock stock and barrel in November 2006. Who knew cat videos could be such a big business? In reality, Google saw ridiculous engagement, mostly on illegal content (which they took on the legal battles without batting an eyelash), that they saw an opportunity to grow it into what it is today…but we’ll get to that later.

Anyways, so here we are, making these fun podcasts and then I asked the group “Hey, what if we put a web cam on us while we talked and uploaded it to this site YouTube. Maybe people would watch us.” It sounded even goofier than podcasting. But we did it.

And it was…something.

But still, we shot our videos, maybe did some editing because we wanted to learn, and then we tossed it up on this site and went along on our merry way.  Sometimes we offended someone, but mostly we just used foul language and talked about Silicon Valley stuff from the perspective of blue collar Philly people.

The years went on and it got more fun. We built a set in a house in Philadelphia and we had actual guests on. (Mostly we just drank and goofed off but it was fun.) The production quality was better, we got more sponsorships, and we kept on doing it for a few years.

Other platforms came along like Blip.tv, and we’d put our stuff on there. But what we were noticing is that people were kinda watching our videos, and then kinda visiting our website and then kinda leaving comments. We had a very small but mighty “Community” and it was cool. And then we went along our merry way, moved all over the country, had families and stopped shooting.

The (de)evolution

The bridge from the “Old” YouTube to the “New” YouTube, in my mind, is when they acquired a company called Next New Networks in 2011.

Former TechCruncher Jason Kincaid’s lede says it all:

Cute kittens and toddlers may be YouTube’s bread and butter, but Google’s video portal needs more than that to encroach on the goliath that is cable TV. But instead of shelling out for the rights to premium content from cable networks, YouTube is hoping it can nudge its existing community toward making high quality videos.

Translation: Spend more time on this stuff and we will make sure you get paid for it.

The game was changed.

From YouTube’s blog in 2011:

In fact, the number of partners making over $1,000 a month is up 300% since the beginning of 2010 and we now have hundreds of partners making six figures a year. But frankly, “hundreds” making a living on YouTube isn’t enough and in 2011 we know we can and should do more to help our partners grow.

Some said that YouTuber PewDiePie makes $12 million a year.

A Year.

Oh yeah, something changed big time in 2011. It’s certainly not fun and games anymore, this is a “business” and when things turn into a business, you lose the fun.

Now I’m not going to get into anymore stats or whatever, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that when millions of people talking about funny cats turns into one person making millions of dollars for their videos, some baaaaad things are going to happen.

Forget YouTube as a “Community” for a second. PewDiePie has a Community. They’re fans. They fight with other Communities to protect their golden child. It gets nasty, and when you zoom out it pretty much looks like a five-year-old arguing on a school blacktop. It’s silly. But when you zoom in, you see something way more nefarious. Those bickering communities drive engagement. A lot of engagement. Engagement is eyeballs, and advertisers pay for eyeballs. They don’t care whose eyeballs and what those eyeballs are watching…they just want to be in front of them.

How does YouTube police this? Well, for the most part, they don’t. Why would they? I say that sarcastically, because of course they should police it. We’re human beings with hearts and souls and feelings. The almighty dollar couldn’t drive most decisions at any company could it? Could it? Of course it does.

Community at scale is an unmitigated disaster

A very smart person who wasn’t always so popular once said “Community Doesn’t Scale” and it threw me into a tailspin. They’re wrong. Look at Facebook, Look At Reddit, Look At YouTube. THEY’RE HUGE!!!”

Clearly, I had missed the point and they were right.

So as this YouTube thing evolved, the happy little coders and engineers and product managers watched how we skipped from cat vid to cat vid, shared them on other sites like MySpace or Fartster or whatever, and built the platform around those tendencies.

Growth hacking. More engagement, more eyeballs, more money, yadda yadda.

So are you surprised that YouTube is now a playground for pedophiles? No..I’m not, because the company that built the growth engine around the early community that just wanted to share a video of their grandfather falling off of his chair while sleeping is now being applied to assholes who call actual other human beings “queer mexicans” for a laugh and views, sans any real humanity behind it.

Duh.

YouTube, with Google’s firepower, has been building this engine since it got its grubby little hands on it in 2006. Twelve Years. It’s taken Twelve Years to become this awful. The Community that YouTube was built around is the Community that is now telling the company that bad things are happening and they might want to take a look at reeling things in before all hell breaks loose and people start dying in large quantities because of the goings on on its site. They call it “personalization” and they say it’s a “tailored experience” and on and on. It’s actually quite laughable how far justification can get you when you don’t really care.

Will YouTube change? HELL NO. Why would they? When you spend that long to perfect being trash, you’re probably pretty proud of it.

Back to “Community”

If you’re a YouTuber user, you’re not a member of its Community. Because if you were, they’d give a shit about you.

Here’s a real definition of “community”: a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.

It’s a feeling, not a box. And that feeling isn’t reciprocated from YouTube. How do I know? YouTube’s CEO has proven it:

My #1 priority is responsibility, even if that comes at the expenses of growth. https://t.co/AnOVkBG0LJ

— Susan Wojcicki (@SusanWojcicki) May 2, 2019

This may rub some the wrong way…but that’s a flat out lie.

Even today’s chest-beating over removing some supremacist and hateful content comes off as extremely weak and self-serving:

“Thanks to these investments, videos that violate our policies are removed faster than ever and users are seeing less borderline content and harmful misinformation.”

Do you want a cookie?

Look, just because we all like to watch videos, we’re a member of a “Community”? Nope, doesn’t work like that. You’re a cog in a wheel, you’re the eyeballs, you’re not a part of something big and great. Your feelings and well-being simply don’t matter. Sucks, but as my dad used to say “dems da breaks.”

Community doesn’t scale, because by nature…it can’t. YouTube may grow in size, but it will grow without the people that they originally built the platform for and around. Shedding annoying skin like a snake. It will evolve, but for the people who use it today for whatever they use it for today that makes more money for YouTube. Make no mistake, their best interests won’t be kept in mind either, just like the original crowd’s wasn’t and weren’t.

The Steven Crowder’s of the world will move out and be replaced by some new jackhole group of people that likes to fish fight each other to the soundtrack of the Terminator or something. Whatever it is, it’ll be weird. And yes, it’ll come with all new problems. And no, YouTube won’t do anything to “fix” them.

YouTube says homophobic taunts don’t violate its policies

The company just doesn’t care.

So yep, things have changed. I’m an “old” but I’m not asking you to get off my lawn. I’m going to get off yours. I had fun making goofy videos and learning how to make them. Hearing from people who liked our stuff was neat. But we moved on. And with YouTube as a whole, I’ll move on. Because it’s not mine anymore.

Maybe I’ll find a new one.

Have fun, and be safe.

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This year’s Computex was a wild ride with dueling chip releases, new laptops and 467 startups

After a relatively quiet show last year, Computex picked up the pace this year, with dueling chip launches by rivals AMD and Intel and a slew of laptop releases from Asus, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Lenovo and other companies.

Founded in 1981, the trade show, which took place last week from May 28 to June 1, is one of the ICT industry’s largest gatherings of OEMs and ODMs. In recent years, the show’s purview has widened, thanks to efforts by its organizers, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council and Taipei Computer Association, to attract two groups: high-end computer customers, such as hardcore gamers, and startups looking for investors and business partners. This makes for a larger, more diverse and livelier show. Computex’s organizers said this year’s event attracted 42,000 international visitors, a new record.

Though the worldwide PC market continues to see slow growth, demand for high-performance computers is still being driven by gamers and the popularity of esports and live-streaming sites like Twitch. Computex, with its large, elaborate booths run by brands like Asus’ Republic of Gaming, is a popular destination for many gamers (the show is open to the public, with tickets costing NTD $200, or about $6.40), and began hosting esport competitions a few years ago.

The timing of the show, formally known as the Taipei International Information Technology Show, at the end of May or beginning of June each year, also gives companies a chance to debut products they teased at CES or preview releases for other shows later in the year, including E3 and IFA.

One difference between Computex now and ten (or maybe even just five) years ago is that the increasing accessibility of high-end PCs means many customers keep a close eye on major announcements by companies like AMD, Intel and Nvidia, not only to see when more powerful processors will be available but also because of potential pricing wars. For example, many gamers hope competition from new graphic processor units from AMD will force Nvidia to bring down prices on its popular but expensive GPUs.

The Battle of the Chips

The biggest news at this year’s Computex was the intense rivalry between AMD and Intel, whose keynote presentations came after a very different twelve months for the two competitors.

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An Inside Look at Google Earth Timelapse

Posted by Paul Dille, Senior Software Developer, Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab, and Chris Herwig, Geo Data Engineer, Google Earth Outreach

Six years ago, we first introduced Google Earth Timelapse, a global, zoomable time-lapse video that lets anyone explore our changing planet’s surface—from the global scale to the local scale. Earth Timelapse consists of 83 million multi-resolution overlapping video tiles, which are made interactively explorable through the open-source Time Machine client software developed at Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab. At its core, Google Earth Timelapse is an example of how organizing information can make it more accessible and useful, turning petabytes of satellite imagery into an interactive experience that shows the dynamic changes occurring across space and time.

In April, we introduced several updates to Timelapse, including two additional years of imagery to the time-series visualization, which now spans from 1984 to 2018, with visual upgrades that make exploring more accessible and intuitive. We are especially excited that this update includes support for mobile and tablet devices, which are quickly overtaking desktop computers as the dominant source of app traffic.

Building the Global Visualization
Making a planetary-sized time-lapse video required a significant amount of pixel crunching in Earth Engine, Google's cloud platform for petabyte-scale geospatial analysis. The new release followed a process similar to what we did in 2013, but at a significantly greater scale—turning 15 million satellite images acquired over the last three and a half decades from the USGS/NASA Landsat and European Sentinel programs into 35 cloud-free 4-terapixel images of the planet—one for each year from 1984 to 2018.

At its native resolution, the Timelapse visualization is a 4 terapixel video (that's four trillion pixels), which would take about 12 days to download on a 95 Mb/s internet connection. Most computers would have difficulty playing a video of this size, let alone with an interactive, zoomable interface. The problem is even more severe for a mobile device.

A solution was pioneered by Google Maps in 2004 with the map pyramiding technique. Before that time, navigating a map required the use of directional arrows to pan and zoom, with each step requiring the page to reload. The map pyramiding technique assembles the full map image displayed on-screen from tens of small 256x256 pixel non-overlapping image tiles in an array, with new tiles fetched as needed at an appropriate resolution as the user pans and zooms across the map.

A traditional Mercator map pyramid contains non-overlapping image tiles.

This works very well for maps made of static images, but less so for pyramids of video tiles, such as those used by Timelapse, since it requires a web browser to keep up to 16 videos in sync while interacting with the visualization. The solution is embodied in CREATE Lab’s open source Time Machine software: create much larger video tiles that can cover the entire screen and only show one whole-screen tile at a time. The tiles create a pyramid, where sibling tiles overlap with their neighbors to provide a seamless transition between tiles while panning and zooming. Though the overlapping tiles require the use of about 16x more videos, this pyramid structure enables the use of Timelapse on mobile devices by minimizing the amount of data required for visualization.

In our newest release, the global video pyramid consists of 83 million videos across 13 zoom levels, which required about 2 million CPU hours distributed across thousands of machines in Google Cloud to generate.

Earth Timelapse uses a pyramid of overlapping video tiles.

Time Travel, Wherever You Are
Prior to April's update, ~30% of visitors to the Timelapse visualization were on mobile devices and didn't actually experience the visualization; instead they saw a YouTube playlist of locations in Timelapse. Until recently, the hardware and CPUs for phones and tablets could not decode videos fast enough without significant delays when someone attempted to zoom in or pan across a video, making mobile exploration unpleasant, if not impossible. In addition, in order for the visualization to be smooth as you pan and zoom, each video that is loaded must sync to the previously playing video and begin playing automatically. But, until only recently, mobile browser vendors had disabled video autoplay at the browser level for bandwidth reasons.

Now that mobile browser vendors have re-enabled video autoplay, we are able to take advantage of current mobile hardware and CPU capabilities, while leveraging the pyramid mapping technique’s efficient use of data, to enable Timelapse on mobile.

Redesigning Timelapse for Exploration Across Devices
Timelapse is a tool for exploration, so we designed for immersiveness, devoting as much real estate as possible to the map. On the other hand, it's not just a map, but a map of videos. So we kept controls visible, like pausing and restarting the timeline or choosing highlights, by leveraging Material Design with simple, clean lines and clear focal areas.

Navigate with Google Maps using the new "Maps Mode" toggle.

To explore, you need to know where you are or where somewhere else is, so the new interface includes a new "Maps Mode" toggle that lets the user navigate with Google Maps. We also built in scalability to the timeline element of the UI, so that new features added in the future, such as lengthening the time-lapse or adding options for different time increments, won’t break the design. The timeline also allows the user to go backwards in time—an interesting way to compare the present with the past.

For desktop browsers supporting WebGL, we also added a new WebGL viewer to the open source project, which loads and synchronizes multiple videos to fill the screen at optimal resolution. The aesthetic improvement of this is nontrivial, with >4x better resolution.

What's next
We're excited about the abundance of freely available, openly licensed satellite imagery and remote sensing data available, enabling new visualizations across time, space, and the visual and non-visual spectrum. We've found it's often the data combined with supplemental layers, such as the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) boundaries, that can spark new insights. For example, seeing the visual connection between declining home ownership and shifts in the city of Pittsburgh's racial makeup tells a story about inequality that numbers on a page simply cannot. Visual evidence can transcend language and cultural barriers and, we hope, generate productive conversations about our global challenges.

Acknowledgements
Randy Sargent, Senior Systems Scientist, Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab and the Google Earth Engine team

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Review: The 2019 Bentley Continental GT is beautiful, excessive and totally worth it

The Bentley Continental GT is iconic. The vehicle has long stood for excess and opulence, and I knew that going in. I expected the Continental GT to be over-engineered and capable of high-speed thrills. And it is, but there’s more.

The tester I’m driving costs $279,000. Of course it’s beautiful and fast and dripping with technology. It’s a Bentley. Inside and out, at high speed or low speed, the latest Continental GT exceeded all my expectations.

The machine glides over the road, powered by a mechanical symphony performing under the hood. The W12 engine is a dying breed, and it’s a shame. It’s stunning in its performance here. This is a 200 mph vehicle, but I didn’t hit those speeds. What surprised me the most is that I didn’t need to go fast. The new Continental GT is thrilling in a way that doesn’t require speed. It’s like a great set of speakers or exclusive liquor. Quality over quantity, and in this mechanical form, the quality is stunning.

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Review

Bentley debuted the Continental GT in 2003 and retained a familiar form over the years. Its mission has remained constant: To be the very best grand touring car available. It’s held that crown on and off since 2003 as other cars entered the game. But with this latest revision, the crown has returned to Bentley. This is an astounding vehicle to take on a road trip. It’s like a private jet on the highway.

Under the long hood sits a massive W12 engine with twin turbos. The setup results in over 620 HP and 664-foot pounds of torque. And it knows how to translate those numbers to the payment. The engine pounds not like a stack of Marshall amps at a Motorhead concert, but pounds like a symphony playing Beethoven’s 5th with intensity.

The Bentley Continental GT performance is where it stands apart.

It glides as speeds reach illegal levels. There’s no drama from the transmission or argument from the engine. When the accelerator drops to the floor, a gateway opens in front of the Bentley, allowing it to transcend space and time as it exceeds posted speed limits.

The Bentley Continental GT lays out its power with the precision of an electric vehicle but the intensity of a street racer. The power delivery is unreal. Under normal driving modes, the transmission is hardly noticeable, and under strain of chasing a quarter mile, the shifts are barely noticeable as it arm wrestles the massive W12.

Driving the Bentley Continental GT is an exercise in restraint. At times, say, when coming’s out of a gnarly curve, you feel the need to slam the pedal to the floor and launch the car off the apex. But that would land you in jail. This is a car that could live its best life on a track, but it doesn’t need the track to be happy. Even driving the Continental GT to the golf course or office park is nearly a thrill.

The GT is just excellent. It inspires confidence and regal intrigue that’s often missing in many of its contemporaries.

Entering the latest Continental is like sinking behind the controls of a fantasy rocket ship. Brushed metal adorns the center stack and handcrafted wood and leather wrap the cabin. Adorable metal pulls control the vents, and machined knobs perform various functions.

The leather is soft and metal real. It’s the little things, too. The lume on the analog clock is fantastic and the wood grain matches throughout. The seats feature a lovely diamond pattern with multiple layers of embroidered detail. Don’t want to look at an LCD screen? Hit a button, and it rotates away, revealing a set of three analog gauges in its place.

However, throughout the Continental GT, there are odd choices of material. Example: The gear shift is plastic and creaks like a well-used toy. It’s an odd choice for a substantial touchpoint. It feels cheap in comparison to gear shifters in other vehicles. BMW, for instance, is using manufactured crystal in its new large SUV and it conveys a sense of stoutness missing in the Bentley’s.

Other plastic bits feel out of place. When sitting down, a bar extends from behind the seats, pushing the seatbelt within reach of the driver. It’s flimsy plastic. The handle on the outside feels loose. Even the key fob is underwhelming; I think the fob for my F-150 is more substantial.

I’m nitpicking, but the Bentley Continental GT costs north of $279,000.

The controls are familiar. The Bentley uses a lot of switch plates and instruments from Audi’s part’s bin though, in the Bentley, they’re chrome. The Audi theme continues to the digital instrument cluster where the shares the same design as the one found in most Audi’s. Expect a similar experience throughout. This isn’t a bad thing. Audi has one of the best interfaces available throughout the industry.

The 2019 Bentley Continental GT is unforgettable. It’s a beautiful combination of obscene power and luxury materials.

I took delivery of this tester on the eve of a long weekend and spent as much time in it as I could. It’s more comfortable than my house. The seats are supple and supportive. The dash impressive with its woodwork and analog dials. The power is intoxicating.

Cars like the Continental GT will likely continue to exist after electric vehicles become the norm. At least until the Earth runs out of oil. They have to. Cars like this will always be a luxury item. They have a soul missing from electric vehicles. There’s nothing like putting your foot down on a Bentley W12 and feeling the world come alive around you.

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Netflix tests an Instagram Stories-like feed called ‘Extras’ in its app

Netflix is testing a new way to help users find something to watch and stay connected with favorite shows with the introduction of an “Extras” tab in its mobile app. The tab, spotted first by Variety, is only a test at this time and is not showing to all users.

If you are in the test group, you’ll see a new button dubbed “Extras” at the bottom of the screen, in between Search and Downloads.

On Android, this is currently the “Coming Soon” section. iOS doesn’t offer this section.

However, instead of only teaser trailers as before in “Coming Soon,” you’ll now find both photos and videos from Netflix shows — including, in some cases, shows you already watch, the report notes.

The videos automatically play silently unless you tap the sound button, it appears. You also move through the feed horizontally. That’s a noticeable change from the “Coming Soon” section’s News Feed-like vertical scroll, and one that feels more like Instagram Stories.

And while you could previously tap “Remind Me” to add shows to your list in the “Coming Soon” section, the “Extras” section has tweaked this to display “Remind Me” on shows you currently watch and “My List” on those you want to add.

A sizable sharing button is also included, allowing you to pass along recommendations to friends through other apps.

Netflix has taken ideas from popular social platforms before, as it did when it launched its own Stories-like feature for previews. It has also leveraged social platforms for sharing recommendations — like when it added Instagram Story integrations. This feature combines both elements, in a way, so could prove popular.

The company confirmed the test with Variety in a statement:

“We are testing a feed of video extras in our mobile app to help fans connect more deeply with the titles they love and discover new ones to watch. These tests typically vary in length of time and by region, and may not become permanent.”

Image credit: Janko Roettgers / Variety

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Google Cloud gets capacity reservations, extends committed use discounts beyond CPUs

Google Cloud made two significant pricing announcements today. Those, you’ll surely be sad to hear, don’t involve the usual price drops for compute and storage. Instead, Googe Cloud today announced that it is extending its committed use discounts, which give you a significant discount when you commit to using a certain number of resources for one or three years, to GPUs, Cloud TPU Pods and local SSDs. In return for locking yourself into a long-term plan, you can get discounts of 55 percent off on-demand prices.

In addition, Google launching a capacity reservation system for Compute Engine that allows users to reserve resources in a specific zone for later use to ensure that they have guaranteed access to these resources when needed.

At first glance, capacity reservations may seem like a weird concept in the cloud. The promise of cloud computing, after all, is that you can just spin machines up and down at will — and never really have to think about availability.

So why launch a reservation system? “This is ideal for use cases like disaster recovery or peace of mind, so a customer knows that they have some extra resources, but also for retail events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday,” Google senior product manager Manish Dalwadi told me.

These users want to have absolute certainty that when they need the resources, they will be available to them. And while many of us think of the large clouds as having a virtually infinite amount of virtual machines available at any time, some machine types may occasionally only be available in a different availability zone, for example, that is not the same zone as where the rest of your compute resources are.

Users can create or delete reservations at any time and any existing discounts — including sustained use discounts and committed use discounts — will be applied automatically.

As for committed use discounts, it’s worth noting that Google always took a pretty flexible approach to this. Users don’t have to commit to using a specific machine type for three years, for example. Instead, they commit to using a specific number of CPU cores and memory, for example.

“What we heard from customers was that other commit models are just too inflexible and their utilization rates were very low, like 70, 60 percent utilization,” Google product director Paul Nash told me. “So one of our design goals with committed use discounts was to figure out how we could provide something that gives us the capacity planning signal that we need, provides the same amount of discounts that we want to pass on to customers, but do it in a way that customers actually feel like they are getting a great deal and so that they don’t have to hyper-manage these things in order to get the most out of them.”

Both the extended committed use discounts and the new capacity reservation system for Compute Engine resources are now live in the Google Cloud.

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Skype publicly launches screen sharing on iOS and Android

Skype is taking one of its most popular desktop features to mobile devices: screen sharing. The company announced on Tuesday that its mobile screen sharing feature is now out of beta testing, allowing both iOS and Android users to share their phone’s screen while on a call.

The feature could be used for work-related purposes, as Microsoft has suggested in the past — like sharing a PowerPoint presentation. But it could also be used for fun — like swiping through a dating app while a friend gives their feedback, or for online shopping alongside a friend. More practically, it could be used to give remote tech help, like when your dad can’t find a setting on his iPhone. (True story).

Mobile screen sharing was first introduced into beta in April for testers, but is now available to all mobile users.

To access the option, Skype users will tap the newly added “…” (more) menu in the app. This is where you’ll find other recently launched features, as well, including call recording and subtitles.

Also new in this release of Skype for mobile, is a redesigned calling screen that now lets you dismiss the call controls with one tap. A second tap dismisses all the controls to make the video call itself the focus. And another tap brings all the controls back.

Despite Skype’s advanced age, the mobile communications app still has some 300 million monthly users. It hasn’t stopped the rollout of new features that allow it to remain relevant in an age where so much messaging is done through chat apps like WhatsApp, Messenger, Snapchat or through built-in communication services like iMessage and FaceTime.

While not all its changes have been a success — last year Skype had to roll back its overly colorful Snapchat-inspired makeover, for example — it still often adds useful features like HD video, encryption by way of the Signal Protocol, and call recording, to name a few.

Mobile screen sharing works on Android 6.0 and higher, and on iOS (iPhone and iPad) with iOS 12 and up. You will only see the option if you’ve updated to the latest release.

Other platforms that support screen sharing include Linux, Mac, Windows, and Skype for Windows 10 (version 14).

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LinkedIn to shutter Chitu, its Chinese-language app, in July, redirects users to LinkedIn in Chinese

LinkedIn has long eyed China as an important country to offset slowing growth in more mature markets. But now it’s calling time on a localized effort after failing to see it pick up steam. The company has announced that it will be shutting down Chitu — a Chinese-only app it had built targeting younger people and those who had less of a need to network with people outside of the country — at the end of July.

The closure is notable for a couple of reasons.

First, it marks a retreat of sorts for LinkedIn in the country from building standalone apps to target younger users, and specifically those targeting young professionals, at the same time that LinkedIn also faces stiff competition from other services like Maimai and Zhaopin.

Second, Chitu was a rare (and possibly the only) example of an app from LinkedIn built specifically to target one non-English market — and a very big one at that — by building a social graph independent of LinkedIn’s. Chitu’s shutdown is therefore a sign of how LinkedIn ultimately didn’t succeed in that effort.

The company posted an announcement of the change in Chinese on Chitu’s website, and a spokesperson for LinkedIn confirmed the changes further in a statement provided to TechCrunch, where it described Chitu — which has been around since 2015 — as “one of many experiments.”

It also noted that it will be upgrading the LinkedIn core app as a “one-stop shop”, incorporating some of Chitu’s features, presumably in an effort to attract Chitu’s users rather than lose them altogether.

“Chitu will officially go offline at the end of July 2019,” the company noted in the statement. “In the future, we will focus on the continuous optimization and upgrade of the LinkedIn app, serving as a one-stop shop to accompany Chinese professionals along each step of their career development and connect to more opportunities.” We’ll post the full statement LinkedIn sent us at the bottom of this article.

LinkedIn first officially set up shop in China back in 2014 as “领英”. Its branding firm pointed out at the time that the characters’ pronunciation, “ling ying,” sounding a bit like “LinkedIn” and loosely meant “to lead elites.” It was initially established as a joint venture with Sequoia and CBC since it was still an independent company and not owned by Microsoft at the time.

LinkedIn already had users in the country at that point — some 4 million individuals and 80,000 companies were already using the English-language version of the site at the time — but the idea was to set up a local operation to seize the opportunity of creating services more tailored to the world’s biggest mobile market, which would include local language support, and to meet the regulatory demands of needing to establish local operations to do that. It included efforts to build integrations with other sites like WeChat, as well as bigger partnerships with the likes of Didi.

A year later, Derek Shen, the LinkedIn executive who led the launch of LinkedIn China, spearheaded the launch of Chitu.

The idea was to build a new app that could tap into the smartphone craze that had swept the country, in particular among younger users who had foregone using computers in favor of their hand-held devices that they used to regularly check in on apps like WeChat.

“In the past year, we have done a lot of localization efforts and achieved great results, such as deep integration with WeChat, Weibo, QQ mailbox, and Alibaba,” he wrote in an essay at the time (originally in Chinese).

“However, in general, we are still maintaining a global platform that is note evolving fast enough, and localization is not determined. We believe that only a product that is independent of the global platform can fully meet the unique needs of social networking in China, so that we can really run like a startup.”

LinkedIn would at the same time continue to build out the Chinese version of LinkedIn itself targeting older and more premium users who might be interacting with people in other languages like English.

From what we understand, Chitu had a good start, with millions of users signing up in the early years, beating LinkedIn itself on user retention rates and engagement.

But a source says that internally it faced some issues for trying to develop an ecosystem independent of the LinkedIn platform, which only became more challenging after Microsoft acquired the company, the source said. (He didn’t say why, but for starters it would have been more lucrative to monetise a single user base, and to develop new features for a single platform, rather than do either across multiple apps.)

“After Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, independence became unthinkable,” the source said. “People with entrepreneurial DNA have all left, so it’s natural to shut down Chitu at this point.” It didn’t help that Shen himself left the company in 2017.

It’s unclear how many users Chitu ultimately picked up but LinkedIn says that it has 47 million LinkedIn members in China, out of a total of 610 million globally. Notably, observers point out that its two big rivals Maimai and Zhaopin are both growing faster.

More generally, and likely to better compete against local players, LinkedIn tells us that it’s rebooted its growth strategy in the country last month. That new strategy appears to be based fundamentally on any new services or partnerships now stemming from one centralised platform.

“2.0 [as the new strategic effort is called] is built on LinkedIn’s vast global network of professionals with real identities and profiles as the foundation and providing a one-stop shop services to our members and constructing an ecosystem in China,” a spokesperson said in response to a question we had about whether the company will continue to build out more partnerships with third parties. “We do not exclude any partners who participate in building this “one-stop shop “and eventually construct a powerful ecosystem.” 

Here is the full statement on the shut-down of Chitu.

“China is core to LinkedIn’s mission and vision globally – creating economic opportunity to every member of the global workforce. Since entering China in 2014, LinkedIn has explored its development path within the Chinese market, adjusting short-term strategies according to changes in the market environment. This includes Chitu, which launched in 2015, to help LinkedIn expand the social network market through the mobile app.

“Chitu is one of many experiments we conducted to continue to learn and provide more value to members. Other efforts include WeChat integration, Sesame Credit partnership etc. Based on user feedback and data analysis, we find that Chinese professionals are proactively seeking for career development opportunities. We incorporate many learnings and insights from Chitu into our new offerings on LinkedIn app that we believe will cover different needs and stages in professional and career development.

“Chitu will officially go offline at the end of July 2019, following the completion of its historical mission. In the future, we will focus on the continuous optimization and upgrade of the LinkedIn app, serving as a one-stop shop to accompany Chinese professionals along each step of their career development and connect to more opportunities.”

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Pokémon Sword and Shield arrive worldwide on November 15, 2019

Nintendo Switch has Pokémon games, but it doesn’t really have its own Pokémon games, not in the true sense. Pokémon Sword and Shield, coming November 15, 2019, will be the first real Pokémon games (don’t even mention Pokémon Let’s Go – don’t) for Nintendo Switch, and now we know more about them thanks to today’s Pokémon Direct livestream event from Nintendo.

Starting with the intro video, you can tell that Sword and Shield will be a full-fledged new extension of the Pokémon world taking place in the new Galar region – a fact emphasized by the theme song that played over it which featured the catchy hook “A whoollle new worlllddd.”

Plus in this new region, part of the fiction is that everyone loves watching battles on TV, which seems like it will come into play for big battles. We also got a glimpse at a bunch of new Pokémon, including a sheep one called Wooloo; a flower thing called Gossifleur (which evolves to Eldegoss); plus a “bite” type called Dredgnaw.

There’s also a new place called, not super imaginatively, the “Wild Area” which is pretty much an open world between human settlements where you get the chance to encounter wild Pokémon you can catch. These will vary depending on weather conditions and time of day, and it looks like much more of a free-ranging experience, when compared to the relatively hard-tracked previous instalments.

Pokémon also get a special power called ‘Dynamax’ in this instalment, which is a special power that makes them huge and more powerful for three turns. This also factors into a new mode where up to four Pokémon trainers can team up to squad raid a single Dynamax wild Pokémon who retains their amped up power for the duration of the conflict. At the end, players get a chance to capture the Pokémon – and some are exclusively available to catch this way.

We also got an intro to new characters including region champion Leon, his younger brother Hop (a primary rival for the player), plus a really quick look at some of the gym battles.

The real capper though was a CG cinematic introducing the game’s legendaries, which are wolf-like Pokémon who have – you guessed it – a sword and a shield respectively. These are called Zacian and Zamazenta.

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AntiToxin sells safetytech to clean up poisoned platforms

The big social networks and video games have failed to prioritize user well-being over their own growth. As a result, society is losing the battle against bullying, predators, hate speech, misinformation and scammers. Typically when a whole class of tech companies have a dire problem they can’t cost-effectively solve themselves, a software-as-a-service emerges to fill the gap in web hosting, payment processing, etc. So along comes AntiToxin Technologies, a new Israeli startup that wants to help web giants fix their abuse troubles with its safety-as-a-service.

It all started on Minecraft. AntiToxin co-founder Ron Porat is cybersecurity expert who’d started popular ad blocker Shine. Yet right under his nose, one of his kids was being mercilessly bullied on the hit children’s game. If even those most internet-savvy parents were being surprised by online abuse, Porat realized the issue was bigger than could be addressed by victims trying to protect themselves. The platforms had to do more, research confirmed.

A recent Ofcom study found almost 80% of children had a potentially harmful online experience in the past year. Indeed, 23% said they’d been cyberbullied, and 28% of 12 to 15-year-olds said they’d received unwelcome friend or follow requests from strangers. A Ditch The Label study found of 12 to 20-year-olds who’d been bullied online, 42% were bullied on Instagram.

Unfortunately, the massive scale of the threat combined with a late start on policing by top apps makes progress tough without tremendous spending. Facebook tripled the headcount of its content moderation and security team, taking a noticeable hit to its profits, yet toxicity persists. Other mainstays like YouTube and Twitter have yet to make concrete commitments to safety spending or staffing, and the result is non-stop scandals of child exploitation and targeted harassment. Smaller companies like Snap or Fortnite-maker Epic Games may not have the money to develop sufficient safeguards in-house.

“The tech giants have proven time and time again we can’t rely on them. They’ve abdicated their responsibility. Parents need to realize this problem won’t be solved by these companies” says AntiToxin CEO Zohar Levkovitz, who previously sold his mobile ad company Amobee to Singtel for $321 million. “You need new players, new thinking, new technology. A company where ‘Safety’ is the product, not an after-thought. And that’s where we come-in.” The startup recently raised a multimillion-dollar seed round from Mangrove Capital Partners and is allegedly prepping for a double-digit millions Series A.

AntiToxin’s technology plugs into the backends of apps with social communities that either broadcast or message with each other and are thereby exposed to abuse. AntiToxin’s systems privately and securely crunch all the available signals regarding user behavior and policy violation reports, from text to videos to blocking. It then can flag a wide range of toxic actions and let the client decide whether to delete the activity, suspend the user responsible or how else to proceed based on their terms and local laws.

Through the use of artificial intelligence, including natural language processing, machine learning and computer vision, AntiToxin can identify the intent of behavior to determine if it’s malicious. For example, the company tells me it can distinguish between a married couple consensually exchanging nude photos on a messaging app versus an adult sending inappropriate imagery to a child. It also can determine if two teens are swearing at each other playfully as they compete in a video game or if one is verbally harassing the other. The company says that beats using static dictionary blacklists of forbidden words.

AntiToxin is under NDA, so it can’t reveal its client list, but claims recent media attention and looming regulation regarding online abuse has ramped up inbound interest. Eventually the company hopes to build better predictive software to identify users who’ve shown signs of increasingly worrisome behavior so their activity can be more closely moderated before they lash out. And it’s trying to build a “safety graph” that will help it identify bad actors across services so they can be broadly deplatformed similar to the way Facebook uses data on Instagram abuse to police connected WhatsApp accounts.

“We’re approaching this very human problem like a cybersecurity company, that is, everything is a Zero-Day for us” says Levkowitz, discussing how AntiToxin indexes new patterns of abuse it can then search for across its clients. “We’ve got intelligence unit alums, PhDs and data scientists creating anti-toxicity detection algorithms that the world is yearning for.” AntiToxin is already having an impact. TechCrunch commissioned it to investigate a tip about child sexual imagery on Microsoft’s Bing search engine. We discovered Bing was actually recommending child abuse image results to people who’d conducted innocent searches, leading Bing to make changes to clean up its act.

AntiToxin identified publicly listed WhatsApp Groups where child sexual abuse imagery was exchanged

One major threat to AntiToxin’s business is what’s often seen as boosting online safety: end-to-end encryption. AntiToxin claims that when companies like Facebook expand encryption, they’re purposefully hiding problematic content from themselves so they don’t have to police it.

Facebook claims it still can use metadata about connections on its already encrypted WhatApp network to suspend those who violate its policy. But AntiToxin provided research to TechCrunch for an investigation that found child sexual abuse imagery sharing groups were openly accessible and discoverable on WhatsApp — in part because encryption made them hard to hunt down for WhatsApp’s automated systems.

AntiToxin believes abuse would proliferate if encryption becomes a wider trend, and it claims the harm that it  causes outweighs fears about companies or governments surveiling unencrypted transmissions. It’s a tough call. Political dissidents, whistleblowers and perhaps the whole concept of civil liberty rely on encryption. But parents may see sex offenders and bullies as a more dire concern that’s reinforced by platforms having no idea what people are saying inside chat threads.

What seems clear is that the status quo has got to go. Shaming, exclusion, sexism, grooming, impersonation and threats of violence have started to feel commonplace. A culture of cruelty breeds more cruelty. Tech’s success stories are being marred by horror stories from their users. Paying to pick up new weapons in the fight against toxicity seems like a reasonable investment to demand.

WhatsApp has an encrypted child porn problem

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Google appeals $1.7BN EU AdSense antitrust fine

Like clockwork, Google has filed a legal appeal against the €1.49 billion ($1.7BN) antitrust penalty the European Commission slapped on its search ad brokering business three months ago.

The Telegraph reported late yesterday that the appeal had been lodged in the General Court of the European Union in Brussels.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the appeal has been filed but declined to comment further.

Reached for comment, a Commission spokesperson told us: “The Commission will defend its decision in Court.”

The AdSense antitrust decision is the third fine for Google under the Commission’s current antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager — who also issued a $5BN penalty for anti-competitive behaviors attached to Android last summer; following a $2.7BN fine for Google Shopping antitrust violations, in mid 2017.

Google is appealing both earlier penalties but has also made changes to how it operates Google Shopping and Android in Europe in the meanwhile, to avoid the risk of further punitive penalties.

In the case of AdSense, the Commission found that between 2006 and 2016 Google included restrictive clauses in its contracts with major sites that use its ad platform which Vestager said could only be seen as intending to keep rivals out of the market.

Restrictions had included exclusivity provisions and premium ad placement requirements that gave Google’s ads priority and plumb positioning on “the most visible and most profitable parts of the page”. Another illegal clause put controls on how partner websites could display rival search ads.

The restrictions were only removed by Google when the Commission issued its formal statement of objections in 2016 — signalling the start of serious scrutiny.

As well as going on to fine Google €1.49BN for AdSense antitrust breaches, the Commission’s enforcement decision requires that Google does not include any other restriction “with an equivalent effect” in its contracts, as well as stipulating that it must not reinstate the earlier abusive clauses.

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How to Organize Your Password Manager in 7 Steps

After using LastPass for over six years, I recently decided to move to 1Password. Once I’d moved my information over to the new service, I realized how much junk had built up in my password manager over the years.

If you’ve decided your password manager needs a cleanup too, what follows is a guide to decluttering your password list and making it more useful. Whether you’ve just switched services or not, everyone can benefit from better password organization.

Step 1: Delete Accounts You No Longer Need

Once you get into the habit of storing every new login in your password manager, it won’t be long before your vault brims over. Logins you used one time to access something in college, duplicates, and websites that no longer exist all waste space and make legitimate passwords harder to find.

Walk through your password manager and trash anything that you’re sure you won’t need again. Categories like those mentioned above are prime candidates for deletion. If you aren’t sure whether you’ll need a login, hold onto it for now. You’ll deal with those in the next step.

Note that you should be careful about duplicate sites. While you don’t need two exact copies of the same account, you might have, say, a personal Microsoft account as well as one for work. In that case, you should clearly mark them so you don’t mistakenly think they’re duplicates. And don’t use the same password for both of them!

Step 2: Create a New Vault for Old Logins

You don’t have to go overboard with deletion. If you think you might need an account in the future, but don’t access it often, you can create a separate vault for those logins.

1Password allows you to create multiple vaults to separate information. LastPass calls these separate vaults Identities. Your password manager may not support this feature, but if it does, it’s a great one to take advantage of.

Take another pass through your list of passwords. Move any logins that you want to keep, but don’t need regularly, to a second vault called Archive or similar. When done, you can exclude that vault from showing in All Vaults to keep them out of sight.

This gives you a safe place to store old data without it getting in your way. It’s better to have these logins handy than to delete them and wish you hadn’t later.

Step 3: Mark Your Favorites

Even if you have hundreds of passwords in your manager, chances are that you only use a few dozen of them regularly. For more efficient access, you should mark these as favorites in your password manager. That way, you can pull them up quickly instead of searching every time.

Like most of these steps, this will differ slightly depending on which password manager you use. In 1Password, simply right-click on an entry and choose Add to Favorites. You’ll then see it in the Favorites tab on the left sidebar.

Step 4: Make Proper Use of Tags

Speaking of cutting down on searching, your next move should be to implement tags for your saved websites. Tags let you group common types of services together, such as Finance, Social, and Shopping.

You’ll see these tags appear on the sidebar of your password manager vault. Grouping sites like this lets you quickly find what you’re looking for, even if it’s not a favorite. It’s also a handy way to identify if you’ve forgotten to add a login for a certain service to your password manager. For example, if you’re looking at your items tagged as Finance and realize you forgot your bank login, you’ll remember to update that password.

Step 5: Sort Notes Into the Right Categories

Password manager notes let you securely store information other than account credentials. Due to the nature of notes, you’ve probably jotted down something quickly and tossed it into your vault without thinking about it. Over time, this can lead to a bunch of scattered notes that aren’t categorized properly.

For this step, look at all the notes in your password manager and make sure they’re set up properly. If you scratched down a password, convert that to a proper login item. Most password managers let you pick a category of data, such as Credit Card or Wireless Router, to add the relevant fields.

You should only use generic notes if the data doesn’t fit into any of those.

Step 6: Review Password Security Issues

At this point, you’ve weeded out old and unneeded entries and categorized the rest of your logins to make them easier to work with. Before you wrap up, you should take a look at the hygiene of your passwords to make sure you’re in good shape.

Because a password manager makes it easy to generate strong passwords and remember them, there’s no reason to keep weak, duplicate, or otherwise vulnerable passwords around. Most password managers have features to help you detect these. 1Password keeps them under Watchtower, while LastPass users can run a security audit to identify them.

Make sure you aren’t using the same password on any websites. If you have any passwords that are short and weak, swap them out for something stronger. Pay close attention to any items that your password manager marks as leaked in data breaches.

Step 7: Miscellaneous Finishing Touches

Your password manager vault is almost perfect now. To put the finishing touches on and make it sparkle, you can take a few extra steps.

While most sites (hopefully) use HTTPS for login these days, 1Password will flag sites for which you have HTTP URLs. If you’ve used a password manager for some time, chances are you have some of these sitting around.

To remove these warnings and make sure you always connect to the HTTPS version of sites, simply make sure each website URL starts with https:// and not http://. It’s a simple matter of adding the s to correct this issue. If you find that a website doesn’t offer HTTPS at all, you should take caution when using it, as HTTP does not transmit credentials securely.

Another minor element to review is the website names in your vault. If you want to keep everything pristine, take another pass through your sites and fix capitalization, website names, and other conventions. For proper alphabetical order, watch out for names that saved as something like login.website.com instead of website.com.

While most websites use your email address to log in, some use a separate username or membership number. Make sure you have the right username set for convenient autofilling.

Finally, you might want to review your list of logins for any additional information you can keep in them. Use the Notes section in a website’s entry for convenient storing of your strong security question answers, PINs, or related info. This keeps you from having to search for this data elsewhere.

Organized Password Manager Bliss

While it’s not the most enjoyable task in the world, cleaning up your passwords is certainly worth the time. Now your password manager has gone from a disorganized junk heap to a well-crafted list. Keep the above tips in mind when adding new logins in the future, and it should never get to an overwhelming point again.

Speaking of which, why not have a look at the best password manager features to get more out of yours?

Read the full article: How to Organize Your Password Manager in 7 Steps

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Minecraft Earth Announced, Zuckerberg’s Podcast, Video Game Ratings

Christian Cawley and Ben Stegner bring you a brand new Really Useful Podcast, returning for a new run of episodes. This time we take a look at some developments for Minecraft fans, Mark Zuckerberg’s new podcast, what apps you should install from Windows 10, and some thoughts on switching from consoles to Windows 10 for gamers.

Listen out too for news of yet another data breach, and a look at video game ratings in North America and Europe.

Really Useful Podcast Season 3 Episode 1 Shownotes

What are we talking about this week?

• Flipboard data breach
• Minecraft Classic in your browser
• Minecraft Earth augmented reality game
• Mark Zuckerberg’s new podcast, Tech & Society
• Video game addiction “real” says WHO
• Windows 10 apps you should uninstall or avoid
• Switching from console to PC gaming
• What do video game age ratings really mean?

This week’s hosts are Christian Cawley and Ben Stegner, who you will find on Twitter as:

• @thegadgetmonkey
• @stegnersaurus

Know anyone who would benefit from having tech topics broken down into simplified language? Share our podcast with them, or suggest they to subscribe.

You’ll find The Really Useful Podcast on:

• iTunes
• Spotify
• Player.FM
• Google Podcasts
• Stitcher.com
• YouTube

Subscribe now and catch every episode of the tech podcast for technophobes!

Read the full article: Minecraft Earth Announced, Zuckerberg’s Podcast, Video Game Ratings

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Uber eats Uber Eats, embedding it in the main app

Uber’s best hope to beat all its ride sharing and food delivery competitors is that it does both. Through cross-promotion, it can combine activities people might only do a few times per week or month into a product they open daily.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said cryptically on the company’s first earnings call last month that “Suffice it to say we are starting to experiment in ways in which we can upsell our ride customers to Eats deals in a way that — you know, to be plain spoken — isn’t annoying . . . I will tell you that we are very, very early in the stages of exploring the many, many ways in which our Ride business can help continue to build our Eats business and vice versa by the way . . . I don’t want to give away too much.”

But TechCrunch has discovered that specifically, Uber is starting to make a web view of Uber Eats accessible from its main app. A tipster in Boston first clued us in to the feature and now Uber confirms that it’s merging a fully functional web version of Uber Eats into its ride-hailing product. Uber quietly began rolling out a pilot of the merged app in late April. Uber Eats app will remain available as a standalone app.

The move could give Uber a customer acquisition and retention edge on single-product competitors like Lyft or DoorDash, while helping it keep up with multi-product peers like Careem and Bolt (which recently added food delivery), and its biggest global foe Didi from China which just launched food delivery in Uber stronghold Mexico. Combining functionality means Uber’s ride hailing customers could see a promotion for Eats and instantly try it without downloading a new app as their tummy rumbles. It could also get the 50% of Eats customers who don’t ride in Ubers to try it for transportation.

“We’re rolling out a new way to order Eats directly in the Uber app on Android (we’ve already been experimenting on iOS)” an Uber spokesperson tells me. “This cross-promotion gives riders who are new to Eats a seamless way to order a meal via a webview instead of opening up the App Store for download.”

The merged app is now available to all iOS users in cities where Uber doesn’t offer bikes and scooters that already clutter the interface of its car service app such as SF, LA, and NYC. The Android version is out to 17% of riders in Uber Eats’ 500 other markets with the goal of the cross-promotional tool being available to all riders outside of micromobility cities soon.

“We believe our platform model allows us to acquire, engage and retain customers with the cost, as well as efficiency and effectiveness advantage over our rivals, typically monoline competitors” Khosrowshahi said on the earnings call. “What we found is that with Rides and Eats . . . we are seeing early signal where essentially you can have very little if any cannibalization of a Ride and throw a significant amount of potential demand onto the Eats side.”

The CEO also mentioned Uber’s loyalty and subscription programs are vital to cross-promotion. Its Uber Rewards that rolled out in January earns users points for both rides and food orders, and higher reward tiers score users free Eats deliveries that could get them hooked on the convenience. And last month, TechCrunch broke the news of Uber prototyping a $9.99 Uber Eats Pass subscription that offers unlimited free Eats deliveries.

“Really what we are looking to do is significantly increase the percentage of our MAPCs [monthly active platform consumers] that use both products [ride-hailing and Eats] and when we see customers using more than one product, their engagement with the platform more than doubles” Khosrowshahi concluded on the call. “So not only does engagement with Uber increase, but the engagement with our individual products increases as well, so it’s kind of a win, win, win.”

Uber’s market is all about lifetime value. If it can lock users in now, it could earn a fortune off them in the decades to come. That’s why it’s spending so much on marketing and expansion now even if it means racking up earnings losses. But its best (and cheapest) marketing channel is likely cross-promotion through the apps it’s already gotten people to install.

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